THE INTERRELATION OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE: THE NOTION OF GESTALT
Keywords:
language and culture, linguoculturology, gestalt, linguistic worldview, cognitive linguistics, linguistic personality, conceptual metaphor, holistic meaning, contrastive linguistics.Abstract
The article examines the interrelation of language and culture as a central problem of modern humanitarian knowledge and traces the role of the gestalt as an analytical unit within this problematic field. The paper outlines the historical-theoretical foundations of the language-culture nexus from the Humboldtian tradition through Sapir to contemporary linguoculturology and cognitive linguistics, demonstrates how the originally Gestaltist principle of holistic perception has been adopted and reinterpreted in linguistic theory, and shows that the notion of the gestalt provides an effective conceptual tool for the description of culturally specific holistic structures of meaning. Particular attention is paid to the function of the gestalt in the structure of the linguistic personality and to its potential for contrastive analysis. The findings argue for the productive integration of the gestalt approach into the methodological apparatus of contemporary comparative linguoculturology.
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